Participated · Series A · Feb 2024

Bria delivers a cloud-based generative AI platform that enables businesses to produce images, videos, and multimedia assets tailored to their brand guidelines. Its patented attribution engine compensates original content creators and data owners, reducing the risk of copyright or privacy infringement for enterprise users. The platform integrates with tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Figma, and AWS, allowing creative teams to embed AI workflows without disrupting existing processes. With fresh capital in hand, Bria intends to deepen its personalization capabilities, extend its attribution system to music and text, and accelerate go-to-market efforts across advertising, media, retail, gaming, and e-commerce. The company emphasizes a “legal-first” approach, giving customers greater transparency, control, and regulatory compliance when deploying AI. Financially, Bria has secured a $40 million Series B round to fund these initiatives, though no revenue or user metrics were disclosed in the article.

Led · Equity · Oct 2020

Duel offers an Advocate Relationship Management platform that lets retail brands such as Lush, ELEMIS, Victoria’s Secret, and Abercrombie & Fitch recruit, activate, and manage large networks of customer-advocates, creators, and ambassadors in a single system of record. The software tracks, rewards, and scales authentic advocacy behaviors, giving brands a measurable, always-on alternative to traditional performance advertising. Duel’s product roadmap includes deeper enterprise AI capabilities to automate the identification, segmentation, and activation of brand fans with hyper-personalized experiences. Fresh Series A capital will support the company’s U.S. expansion following its recent move into New York and fuel category thought-leadership through its Building Brand Advocacy podcast and community. Long term, Duel aims to establish Brand Advocacy as the default growth strategy not only in retail but also in sectors like B2B, music, hospitality, professional services, and entertainment. The company reports that 20–33% of a typical brand’s customers are already active creators and that its platform can manage tens of thousands of advocates with the resources traditionally needed for only a few hundred. Including the new round, Duel has raised more than $21 million to date.

Led · Equity · Mar 2018

NewsGuard builds a ratings and "Nutrition Label" system that evaluates the 7,500 most accessed and shared news and information websites in the U.S., assigning Green, Yellow, or Red ratings. The company will hire dozens of trained journalists as analysts; two analysts independently review each site and produce editable Nutrition Labels, with senior editorial officers resolving disputes. A 24/7 SWAT Team will rate newly trending sites in real time. NewsGuard will supply free browser plug-ins to news literacy groups, schools, and individual consumers and will license its ratings and labels to social media, search platforms, and other aggregators. The company plans to launch in the U.S. ahead of the mid-term elections and then expand to other countries. Financially, NewsGuard has raised $6M in funding to support these operations.

Participated · Series C · Feb 2016

Jana operates the mCent Android app that gives users free, unrestricted mobile data in exchange for immersive advertising experiences (for example, spending minutes in advertisers’ apps or receiving promotional content). The company is integrated into the back-end billing systems of 311 mobile operators across 93 countries and says 30 million people have used its service; Jana also claims it can provide free connectivity to up to 4.5 billion phone numbers from partner operators. Jana is a roughly 85-person, Boston-based team that spent seven years building its infrastructure, which completed in 2014. Management says the business has been profitable in some quarters and that the company can drive significant revenue and margins. Jana plans to scale its advertising sales organization to monetize partnerships more effectively and compete with large tech players targeting emerging markets. The company’s model centers on partnering with advertisers and mobile operators to subsidize data rather than charging end users. TxtEagle provides crowdsourcing and market-research services in developing markets by forwarding surveys and tasks to thousands of GSM phone users via the USSD protocol rather than SMS. Its platform sends work to members and compensates them primarily with mobile airtime, and it is also hooked into mobile cash services such as Kenya’s M-PESA. The company works with 220 mobile operators in almost 100 countries, collectively covering roughly 2.1 billion subscribers, and serves clients including UN researchers and advertisers. By using free USSD communications and airtime payments, TxtEagle addresses the cost constraints of prepaid users in low-income regions. Financially, the company recently raised $8.5 million from a consortium including Spark Capital and RBC Venture Partners. Long-term, CEO and co-founder Nathan Eagle (an MIT professor) plans to evolve the platform into a mechanism for community-generated content similar to Craigslist or Wikipedia.

Participated · Seed · Jun 2014

Pie offers cross-platform team chat applications on iOS, Android, Mac, and the web, integrating with Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, and other cloud tools. Designed to be less intimidating than traditional enterprise chat products, it deliberately omits developer-centric features, positioning itself for small and midsize businesses and other non-tech verticals such as flower shops, manufacturing plants, universities, and churches. With no paid promotion, the service is already used by more than 2,000 companies, and over 30 % of registered users are active each month. The company plans to introduce a paid tier at $3.14159 per user per month that will add admin controls and rely on a reseller model for distribution. Initial monetization efforts will focus on Japan, leveraging investor relationships for market entry while continuing organic growth in the U.S. Pie’s 10-person team will expand to support product development and go-to-market activities. The founders, Pieter Walraven and Thijs Jacobs, believe Pie can capture an underserved segment that lies between consumer messaging apps and heavier enterprise collaboration suites.